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"I don't think it's kerzackerly funny," said Master Watson, who had perhaps inherited from his father, the Hallbury solicitor, a habit of thinking before he spoke and speaking with rather ponderous authority.

"Never mind, Tom, when you know Latin properly you'll laugh like anything," said Master Gresham, with a kindly patronizing manner which his mother found intolerable, but which Master Watson appeared to take gratefully. "Oh, mother, Mrs. Morland rang you up. She's going to ring you up again. She says Uncle Tony is fighting in a canal. Mother, Tom got twenty-eight snails and I got thirty-three. Oh, mother, can we pick lettuces?"

"I don't think we want any to-day," said his mother, answering his last remark first.

"I don't mean us; I mean for Tom's rabbits, mother. Tom's cook told him the gardener had sold all the lettuces so Tom said he'd get some of ours. Can we, mother?"

Jane found this vicarious generosity rather embarrassing. The lettuces were not Frank's, they were not hers. They belonged in theory to Admiral Palliser, in usage to the cook and the gardener. There had already been words about them, the cook accusing the gardener of neglecting to bring any in, so that she had to take a basket and go down the garden just as she was if the Admiral was to get his dinner that night, the gardener maintaining that in the gardens he'd been in the cook never set foot in the kitchen garden and he'd rather not bring the vegetables up to the house if it was going to make unpleasantness. To which the cook had replied, if kitchen garden meant kitchen garden, it was for growing kitchen stuff and she'd put the gardener's elevenses in the wash-house. All this Jane, unfortunately for her own peace of mind, had heard from the bathroom window, as she was washing Frank's vest and stockings.